"Yes," she said, "you see
it was--I don't know exactly how to put it--but it was England to
America."
"FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO"
BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From _Pictorial Review_
When Christopher Kain told me his story, sitting late in his
dressing-room at the Philharmonic I felt that I ought to say something,
but nothing in the world seemed adequate. It was one of those times when
words have no weight: mine sounded like a fly buzzing in the tomb of
kings. And after all, he did not hear me; I could tell that by the look
on his face as he sat there staring into the light, the lank, dark hair
framing his waxen brow, his shoulders hanging forward, his lean, strong,
sentient fingers wrapped around the brown neck of "Ugo," the 'cello,
tightly.
Agnes Kain was a lady, as a lady was before the light of that poor worn
word went out. Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing in face and
form the fragile beauty of a rose-petal come to its fading on a windless
ledge, she moved down the years with the stedfast sweetness of the
gentlewoman--gentle, and a woman.
They knew little about her in the city, where she had come with her son.
They did not need to. Looking into her eyes, into the transparent soul
behind them they could ask no other credential for the name she bore and
the lavender she wore for the husband of whom she never spoke.
She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and to her son. As
Christopher grew through boyhood, she watched him; in her enveloping
eagerness she forestalled the hour when he would have asked, and told
him about his father, Daniel Kain.
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